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Read, Reading, and To Read

The week before last I had a stack of books to read that looked like this:

I knew I couldn't read them all in a week, what with working and sleeping and spending ages on Twitter. But two weeks later, and the pile is 90% complete.

I read and loved and blogged aboutThe Something by Rebecca Cobb. It's a lovely picture that I'm very glad I bought.

The Courage of Cowards was an interesting and sometimes moving look at the personal stories of conscientious objectors during the First World War. The stories are partly told through fictionalised dialogue; the historian bit of me did feel uneasy with this device at times but I think the book just about gets away with it. Maybe.

Murder Underground went down reasonably well at Friday Book Club. Everyone liked it overall, and the descriptions of the Underground and boarding houses were very well liked. The insights it inadvertently gave into class and gender norms in the 1930s were also much remarked upon.

The Vanishing Witch is the one I'm still reading, largely because I mislaid it for a while. It turned up when I straightened up the pile of books teetering on my bedside table. More on its merits once I've finished it.

The Fair Fight is my pick of the pile. What a thing of much marvellousness. I love the eighteenth century, and I have some fondness for boxing (truly), and it's no secret I adore visceral writing. It's got passion and obsession and bodies in all their flaws and glory. Yes, I love this book. This is on the Green Carnation Prize list, and they've chosen well.

Earlier in the week these are the books I gathered together to read next:

I have two spooky picture books for Halloween, which are both amazing. The Sleeper and the Spindle is by the winning combination of Neil Gaiman and Chris Riddell. I'm working my way through the New 52 Bats, this is the second Batman bind-up, The City of Owls. The Sick Rose is all about the pictures; breathtakingly beautiful depictions of terrible horrible illnesses. I realised I hadn't finished reading it, so it's on the pile. The eBook, which I don't have a proper cover for, is Lynn Shepherd's new novel The Pierced Heart. It's inspired by Dracula, so it is also perfect for this time of year.

This little lot won't take me long to read, so I do have another couple lined up. And then another few after that...

The story of Lizzie Borden has a whiff of folklore about it, it feels hazy to me, apocryphal perhaps, something half known and uncertain like Washington and the cherry tree or the ride of Paul Revere. Shamefully, I had to Google both the latter two examples to double check they were the events I thought I was referring to. I choose them deliberately though - is it my Englishness that makes these events fuzzy to me? Do these stories live in the American psyche the way Magna Carta, Henry VIII and his six wives, and Jack the Ripper (to select three almost at random) live in mine?
I remember a book we stocked when I was a very young bookseller at Waterstones in Watford that looked at the psychology of children who murder their parents. The copy on the back of the book talked of Lizzie Borden. I remember half wondering about the case, then shelving the book away and moving onto the next armful. But it stuck in my m…

My nieces and nephews and I have a monthly book club, called Book Chase (although it sometimes gains an extra 's' to become Book Chasse). The rules are simple: we all bring something we've read during the last month, talk about it to each other, and eat snacks. We live tweet each meeting with the hashtag BookChase. Sometimes, when we remember, we Storify all the tweets too. This month, we remembered!